Clifford Simak - Out of Their Minds

He turned his head aside and spat a neat stream of tobacco juice onto the face of one of the boulders.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"The Rebs are bringing up their guns," he said. "All morning they been at it. They must have a thousand of them, on the rise across the way. Lined up, hub to hub."

I shook my head, "Not a thousand of them. Two hundred would be closer to it."

"Mebbe you are right," he said. "I guess them Rebs ain't got no thousand guns."

"This must be Gettysburg," I said.

"Of course it's Gettysburg," he said, disgusted. "Don't tell me you don't know. You couldn't have been here long without knowing what it. is. There've been right smart doings here, I tell you, and if I don't miss my guess, we'uns are going to start catching hell again in just a little while."

It was Gettysburg, of course. It simply had to be. There had been, I recalled, a fleeting familiarity to the grove of trees the night before—last night, I thought; had it been

last night, or a century before last night? In this world did time make as little sense as all the rest of it?

I crouched on the bed of leaves and tried to get my bearings. Last night a grove of trees and a clump of boulders and this morning Gettysburg!

I bent my head and crawled out from between the boulders, but stayed squatting to face the man who'd wakened me. He shifted the quid from one cheek to the other and looked me over closely.

"What outfit are you with?" he asked, suspiciously. "I don't recollect no one rigged out the way you are."

If I had been a bit more alert, perhaps I could have found an answer, but my mind still was fogged with sleep and my skull still hurt from the knock upon the boulder. Waking up at Gettysburg hadn't helped me, either. I knew that I should answer, but there was no answer I could think of, so I simply shook my head.

On the summit of the slope above me, cannons were ranged in line, with the cannoneers beside them, standing stiff and straight, staring out across the swale that lay below the ridge. A field officer sat erect upon a horse that was prancing nervously, while on the slope below the cannon the infantry lay sprawled in a long, uneven line, some of them behind barricades variously constructed, some of them flat upon the ground, while others sat around at leisure, all staring off across the swale.

"I don't like it," said the soldier who had found me. "I don't like the looks or smell of it. If you are from the town^ you ain't got no business up here."

From far off came a heavy bang, sonorous, but not very loud. At the sound, I stood up and looked across the swale_ and could see that from the tree line on the opposite ridge a puff of smoke was drifting up. Further down the line of trees there was a sudden flash, as if someone had opened the door of a red-hot stove, then closed it immediately.

"Get down!" the soldier was yelling at me. "Get down, you goddamn fool..»

The rest of what he said was blotted out by a jarring crash from somewhere just behind me.

I saw that he was flat upon the ground and so were all the others. I threw myself heavily, sprawling. Another crash sounded to my left and then I saw the sparkling of many stove doors opening along the other ridge. From the air above and ahead of the ridge on which I lay came the sound of whickering objects traveling very fast, and then, on the ridge behind me, the entire world blew up.

And kept on blowing up.

Beneath me the very ground was bucking with the cannonade. The air thundered until it was unendurable and kept on being unendurable. Smoke drifted across the heaving ground and as a sort of undertone to the crashing of the shot and shell were whirring, whistling noises. With that utter clarity of thought which sometimes comes when one is stiff with fear, I realized that the whistling was made by chunks of metal flying off the ridge behind me and spraying down the slope.

With my face pressed tight against the ground, I twisted my head so that I could have a look back at the ridgetop. I was surprised to find there wasn't really much to see— certainly not what I had expected seeing. A heavy fog bank of smoke obscured the entire ridge, hanging not more than three feet above the ground. Below the smoke I saw the legs of frantic gunners as they worked their battery of guns, as if a group of half-men were firing a battery of half-guns, with only a little better than a half of the carriages showing, the rest obscured by roiling smoke.

Out of that roiling smoke came stabbing bursts of fire as the hidden guns fired back across the swale. At each belch of flame, I felt an angry flare of heat sweep through the air above me, but the uncanny thing about it was that the barking of those cannons firing directly over me was so muffled by the racket of the bombardment which swept the ridge that it sounded as if they were being fired from some distance off.

Through the cloud bank of smoke, and above it, the shells were bursting, but the bursts, dimmed by the smoke, were not the quick, bright flashes of light one would have expected them to be, but twinkling spurts of red-orange flame that ran along the ridge like a flashing neon sign. A huge explosion sent a flare of brilliant red flashing through the smoke and a massive volcano of black smoke went surging upward through the gray cloud bank. One of the plunging shells had found a caisson.

I huddled closer against the ground, doing my best to burrow into it, to press myself so flat and make myself so heavy that my weight would dent the ground and thus offer me protection. I remembered, as I huddled there, that I probably was in one of the safest spots on all of Cemetery Ridge, for on that day more than a century ago the Confederate gunners had been aiming high, with the result that the worst of the bombardment fell, not on the ridge itself, but on the reverse slope of the ridge.

I twisted my head around to its original position and looked across the swale and over on Seminary Ridge another cloud of smoke was boiling above the treetops, while near the base of the cloud ran tiny flickerings, marking the mouths of the Confederate cannons. I had said two hundred to the soldier who had spoken to me and now I recalled that it had been a hundred and eighty and that on the ridge behind me were eighty others replying to that hundred eighty—eighty-odd, the books had said. And that it now must be somewhat after one o'clock, for the cannonade had started at shortly after one and had continued for two hours or so.

Over there, somewhere, General Lee sat on Traveller and watched. Over there, somewhere, Longstreet sat glumly on a rough rail fence, pondering his conviction that the charge which he must order would surely fail its purpose. -For this kind of charge, he figured, was the Yankee way of making war that the South's best hope had always been a stubborn defense, luring the Union forces into attack and holding hard against them and wearing down their strength.

But, I told myself, my thinking held a flaw. There was no Lee or Longstreet over on that other ridge. The battle that had been fought on this ground had been fought more than a century ago and would not be fought again. And this mock battle which here was being staged would not be a re-enactment of the battle as it had been really fought, but a playing over of the tradition of it, of the way in which later generations had imagined it had been fought.

A chunk of iron plunged into the ground just ahead of me, tearing up the turf. I reached out a cautious hand to touch it, but jerked it back before I touched it, for the iron was hot. And that chunk of iron, I felt very sure, if it had hit me, could have killed me as easily and effectively as if this had been an actual battle.

Over to my right was the small grove of trees where the Confederate charge had reached highwater mark and then had dwindled away, back down the slope again, and back of me and also to the right, but now concealed by cannon smoke, were the great ugly cemetery gates. The country looked, I had no doubt, as it had looked that day more than a century ago and this re-enactment of the battle would adhere to the timetables, so far as they could be known, and the movements of specific regiments and smaller military groups, and all the rest of it, but there would be much that would be lost, the little details that later generations did not know or glossed over in preference to really knowing them—all the things that Civil War round tables, meeting once- a month for dinner and discussion, might know for a certainty or might suspect were right, would be here re-enacted, but one would not find here the things that no man could have known without having lived through the actual battle.